LinuxPlanet: .comment: A Winding Path to KDE3

"It had been several weeks since last I compiled the KDE3 source, and at that time it was unpromising in a number of ways. Chief among them was that none of my configuration files, achieved through months of tuning here and there, little or none of it documented, survived the switch. So I'd build KDE3, poke around in it a little, be cranky over the fact that typeface handling -- spacing, anti-aliasing -- was broken, discover some other things I didn't like, and return to KDE-2.2.1.

This time was different.

Following the splash screen (whose animated icons are for some reason silhouettes on my machine), I was treated to a desktop that looked exactly like my KDE-2.2.1 desktop. Now, if my desktop were utterly stock KDE, this would be no great achievement. But for a desktop background I use XPlanet set up do do the phases of the moon in near-realtime, updating hourly. I keep no icons at all on the desktop, relying solely on Kicker, which I have set to autohide. (It had always annoyed me a little that Kicker left a couple-pixel-wide line at the bottom of the screen when autohidden, but in KDE3 this is no longer the case -- when it autohides, it hides completely.) When I looked at Kicker, there were no broken-link icons, though there were a couple of new docked applets. One was the KDE laptop daemon, which is superfluous on a desktop machine. The other was a little U.S. flag with "U.S." superimposed over it. I killed both of these, because I don't change charsets and, again, this was not a laptop machine. I also killed, with the usual difficulty, the KOrganizer alarm daemon. I would be far more inclined to use KOrganizer if it didn't make it so troublesome to shut it down entirely when one is done with it. Others, I suppose, don't mind this; I try to avoid having running on my machine anything that I don't use, and I don't use the KOrganizer alarms."

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• dot.kde.org: KDE Icon Chatter(Jan 28, 2002)
• KDE 3.0 Release Plan Adjusted, Release Candidate 1 Scheduled for February 4(Jan 23, 2002)
• news.kde.org: KDE 3.0 Screenshots (A/K/A, Do You Like Themes?)(Nov 16, 2001)
• LinuxPlanet: .comment: Leveraging Linux(Nov 14, 2001)
• dot.kde.org: C Mania: KDE 3 Offers C Bindings(Oct 24, 2001)
• LinuxPlanet: .comment: KDE3 Is Coming(Oct 11, 2001)
• Dirk Mueller: KDE 3.0 release plan(Sep 08, 2001)